Rumsfeld
Takes More Friendly Fireby Jim Lobe
November 11, 2003

The
right-wing coalition that powered the United States into Iraq earlier
this year appears in ever greater disarray amid increasingly heated
complaints by friends, as well as foes, that the US occupation is not
going well at all.

The
main target is Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, who appears increasingly
at a loss to explain US strategy beyond his now-famous admission in
a "leaked" memo to his top aides last month that the situation
in Iraq  not to mention the wider war against al-Qaeda terrorists
 will be a "long, hard slog."

That
was before Iraqi insurgents shot down a Chinook transport helicopter,
killing 15 US servicemen at a single blow 10 days ago, and then destroyed
a Blackhawk helicopter late last week and killed 6 more.

Meanwhile,
the daily US death count, as well as the number of attacks against US
forces, has roughly doubled since midsummer, while public confidence
in President George W. Bush's Iraq policy continues to erode.

A
whopping 87 percent of respondents in one ABC-Washington Post
poll taken before the Chinook disaster said they feared that the United
States is getting bogged down, while public and media discourse is increasingly
studded with the dreaded "V" word, for Vietnam.

While
military commanders continue to insist that the attacks on US forces
do not amount to anything like a strategic threat, their latest reactions
suggest a sharp rise in concern, at the very least.

In
the past week, for example, the administration announced a dramatic
acceleration of plans to recall thousands of Iraqi army troops, police
and even intelligence officers to active duty, a strategy that will
necessarily mean far less training than originally contemplated and
a much stronger likelihood that former Baathists or other anti-US elements
will be back in uniform.

Moreover,
US military raids against suspected guerrilla strongholds in the so-called
"Sunni Triangle" in central Iraq are now being carried out
with much more firepower.

After
the Blackhawk was shot down, US warplanes dropped 500-pound bombs on
suspected enemy sites near Tikrit and Fallujah for the first time since
Bush declared that major combat operations in Iraq had ended May 1.

Other
reports said that tanks and howitzers were also involved in an assault,
in what commanders in the field called "a show of force."

As
more than one commentator has pointed out, such tactics risk undermining
the battle for "hearts and minds" in the most troublesome
Sunni areas, which Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) chief Paul
Bremer says must become a focus of US efforts.

"These
growing attacks against American forces have two clear goals: inflict
casualties and force a reaction that alienates the local population,"
wrote
Milt Bearden, a retired Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer
who oversaw US covert actions against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan
in the 1980s, in the New York Times Sunday.

"Both
are being achieved, as the quick-response raids by coalition troops
to seize those behind the attacks fuel Iraqi alienation."

But
that is not the only risk of more aggressive tactics. Larger shows of
force also demonstrate to the public both here and in Iraq that the
insurgency must be taken seriously.

In
the face of this development, the administration in general and Rumsfeld
in particular, are getting no end of increasingly biting advice, from
friendly as well as less friendly sectors.

Neo-conservatives,
the most insistent war boosters outside the administration before last
March's invasion, are plainly upset with what they see as Rumsfeld's
desperation to reduce US troop numbers in favor of activating the Iraqis.

In
a two-page lead editorial Monday, the Weekly Standard newspaper
accused the defense chief, its former hero, for essentially subverting
the express wishes of the commander-in-chief.

"The
president wants to win, and the Pentagon wants to get out," wrote
Executive Editor William Kristol and Contributing Editor Robert Kagan
in their piece called Exit
Strategy or Victory Strategy?

The
accelerated "Iraqification" strategy, according to the two
founders of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC)  the
platform on which the "Attack Iraq" coalition behind Bush's
post-Sept. 11 policies was forged  posed a potential disaster
given the likelihood that the force will be inadequately trained and
almost certainly penetrated by Baathists.

"It
takes only a couple of mistakes in background checks to have a disaster,"
they warned.

Their
answer is to sharply increase US troop numbers in Iraq, particularly
in Sunni areas, and to increase the size of the US army from 10 to 12
divisions, even at the risk of fueling public worries that the country
is becoming a quagmire, both militarily and fiscally.

Their
advice echoed that given by Republican Senator John McCain, who, in
a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations last week, charged that
the administration's actions, in contrast to its rhetoric, was creating
the impressions that "our ultimate goal in Iraq is leaving as soon
as possible, not meeting our strategic objective of building a free
and democratic country in the heart of the Arab world."

McCain
stressed that he believed Washington could still achieve its strategic
objective with a greater military commitment, "but not if we lose
popular support in the United States."

But
that appears to be what is happening, judging by the latest polls, as
well as the increasing frequency with which the current situation is
being compared to the Vietnam War.

For
their part, Democrats are behaving cautiously, seeing in the administration's
obvious flailing about an opportunity to score political points and
attack Bush's unilateralism.

Their
leading presidential candidates also agree with the administration,
the neo-conservatives and McCain that "cutting and running"
is unacceptable because Washington would lose all "credibility"
 another oft-heard echo of Vietnam  in the Middle East and
beyond, and leave Iraq to the Baathists and even Islamist terrorists.

Their
general solution is to internationalize the occupation, both by enlisting
NATO forces under US command to keep the peace and by handing control
of the civil and economic administration to the UN Security Council
or some other multilateral mechanism.

But
both options were rejected by Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney
in September, and the deterioration in the security situation since
then makes it much less likely that either the United Nations or most
NATO members will want to get deeply involved.

Jim
Lobe, works as Inter Press Service's
correspondent in the Washington, D.C., bureau. He has followed the ups
and downs of neo-conservatives since the well before their rise in the
aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks.